As an organization that is initially external to the state and strictly hierarchically structured, classical fascism gains dominance over the state apparatuses through legal seizures of power, only to then merge with specific apparatuses, whereby the capitalist system in crisis is retained and forcibly secured on a new level. At the beginning of the fascization process, the fascist party is thus still outside the state apparatuses, which it later takes over and gradually changes, whereby the restructured repressive state apparatus in particular can even dominate the fascist party in the second phase of power integration, namely via the mechanisms of the political police, which is now more important than the administration, the army and the bureaucracy. (Poulantzas 1973: 356)
The war machine is implanted in the state as a performative principle of organization and develops a suicidal tendency in and through the state in a process of flight and escalation, while the political police switch to the practice of terror against the population, especially against its resistant and oppositional parts, for which the fascist mass party can also mobilize large sections of the population (do the masses want fascism?). The hysterically acting fascist mass party, which has a special function not only in the repressive, but also in the ideological state apparatuses, pursues the permanent mobilization of the masses, while at the same time the sharpest form of social exclusion and warehousing takes place, with the extermination of the Jews as a race to be specified and the Bolshevik producers (as a class without race) at the center of German fascism. In terms of propaganda, fascism constantly brings the concepts of the Volksgemeinschaft, racism and nationalism into play in opposition to liberalism and allows them to circulate hysterically, precisely in order to sensitize and strengthen the population’s empathy for the state’s potential for annihilation.
Fascism thus marks the transition from apparent peace to open war, whereby the state also becomes part of a war machine that it has itself unleashed from a certain point in time. According to Deleuze/Guattari, this type of fascist war machine, which aims to destroy populations, emerges from the state itself. Described by Poulantzas as a specific form of the exceptional state (other forms for him are military dictatorship and Bonapartism), fascism leads to a reorganization of the state system and to shifts and displacements of power within its repressive, ideological and economic apparatuses, whereby the repressive apparatus becomes dominant, but drastic changes also take place in the other apparatuses, for example when the political police increasingly take on ideological tasks. (ibid.: 342). In fascism, the legal system continues to guarantee production and property relations, but also takes on the direct political function of controlling and intervening in class struggles. It must be taken into account that the law no longer reliably regulates the execution of power by the state apparatuses and access to these apparatuses and their relations to each other; rather, legal arbitrariness prevails, which also eliminates the precedent of the legal system’s own transformation rules.
At the same time, the masses are permanently mobilized and constituted as a nation, a specific process described in detail by George Mosse in his book Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer. For Mosse, National Socialism is merely the borderline case of democracy, in that it takes the indoctrination of homogeneous collective ideas, which can always be observed in democracies, to an extreme. (Mosse 1979: 15ff.) ) The preaching of power here is akin to the irrationalism of fascist mass politics, which realizes a unity of the people that only exists on paper and makes it tangible and perceptible to a certain extent. In this way, the general will of the state is presented day after day as a collective emotion. The Nazis extended the process of constructing the emotionalization of unity to an entire people and pushed it to the extreme of annihilation, which included their own suicide. In doing so, fascism translates the collective psychologies into external manifestations, monuments and channeling systems into which the masses flow and in which their expressions and desires can collectively circulate, desires that also include the transgression of prohibition, which in turn wants to be shared with many and culminates in monumental representations. There is a rapid increase in medial tendencies, which can also be found in certain democratic procedures and ceremonies. (Deleuze and Guattari have sharply criticized democracy in all its forms and constellations and call it the cousin of totalitarianism). The nation now coagulates into an imaginary incarnation of the people; it is a specific national self-representation based on what unites the people: language, history, homeland, blood, etc.[1].
The AfD dominated much of the penultimate election campaign, succeeding in replacing the social antagonism between rich and poor with the propaganda of “Germans versus foreigners” in the public eye, and all the major parties have more or less aligned their policies with the AfD’s interjections. With their tireless warnings about the AfD, the enlightened wing of the Germans shows above all that they are determined to carry on as before, to stick together in their small country and close both eyes to the world outside, except to use it as a cheap vacation paradise and a dumping ground for their own goods, and finally, in social amnesia, to take every institution to which they submit for granted and, above all, to see anything that disturbs them, even if it is the AfD, merely as an occasion for mental indigestion. Attributing racism solely to the AfD masks the racism of the majority. It is now common knowledge that in order to dominate refugees, they have to be integrated or, alternatively, turned into potential criminals, into racist, despised dominated people. For the refugee, integration then means mimicking the German. This is the still misunderstood idea of German education: to educate a monkey. And we must not forget that the right-wing populists from the AfD to the CSU have made an offer to the section of the population at the bottom of the social hierarchy based on explaining their social dissatisfaction with the threat to German prosperity posed by the refugees. As offended Germans, the socially weak can then also feel strong and demand that the sums of money the state spends on controlling the refugees should be restricted, as the refugees get everything and the locals nothing, and so on and so forth. In the rejection of everything foreign, the various classes and strata then close ranks, the class system turns its antagonisms and the harshness of its competition completely outwards.
The new neo-fascist movements are attempting to subordinate the capitalist economy to the logic of civil war (without, however, touching the rules of the economy in any way), especially when, as is the case today, it no longer seems possible for sections of the middle classes to follow various neoliberal postulates that call for the enrichment of the self, the self-reliant entrepreneur and cultural singularity due to their economic precarization. In its boom phase, the neoliberal project propagated individualism without the individual and fierce competition and must now feed the resentment (of the middle classes) in the face of the impending decline of the middle classes and thus also promote identitarian politics, xenophobia and paranoia. The conglomerate of neoliberal governance practices was initially simply adopted by the post-fascist movements in order to reconfigure a set of dispositifs that intensify civil war. The biopolitical concept of these post-fascisms is the direct implantation of race war into class conflict. It is therefore not surprising that the important operations of right-wing populist and neo-fascist politics, which operate in the real milieu of war with and against the populations, define as their enemies above all the deeply colonized sections of the population such as migrants, refugees and Muslims. The resistant subjects in this context, who today are politically sui generis, since they are quasi integrated as a homogeneous group into the global world market, where they are totally dispossessed and disenfranchised and thus express the truth of the current economic and political world situation, are the migrants and refugees, who usually risk their (naked) lives during their flight[2].
It is not the dynamics of biopower that determine racism, but the latter insists on the need to intensify class division within the population, a population that cannot reproduce itself without being divided, whereby it is also differentiated from the outset from a biopolitical point of view by the strategies of capital, whose class struggle thus already has a racist component. When, in 2008, the management of the financial crisis in the capitalist core countries, which in Europe in particular consisted of transferring the debts of private banks to the taxpayers[3], was accepted by the public, it was clear that both the transnational war machine of capital and the states had to set in motion a new wave of internal and external colonization of certain population groups in order, on the one hand, to absorb state debt through an intensified austerity policy and, on the other, to find an enemy that could be blamed for the misery. [4] The dismantling of the welfare state and the stagnation or reduction of real wages meant that private households were further integrated into the debt economy and had to “speculate” on their income in financial terms. And debt must be understood as an apparatus of power that particularly affects women, black people and the poor. Racist policies, especially institutionalized racism, have been part of austerity policies from the beginning. After the 2008 crisis, racism and nationalism were thus definitively elevated to the heights of state power.
Let it sink in: after the financial crisis of 2008, assets amounting to around 40 trillion US dollars disappeared into thin air on a global level and in the USA alone, 14 trillion US dollars in private household assets vanished into thin air. Long before this, the flows of money capital and finance denominated in US dollars, which had grown steadily since the 1970s due to the US trade deficit among other things, had become detached from global trade volumes. Since the 2000s, the major European banks in particular had bought huge amounts of US dollar-denominated securities and derivatives, some of which, as it turned out during the crisis, were toxic, resulting in a gigantic gap in coverage for the dollar financing of European banks. When the market collapsed in 2008, for example, German banks’ outstanding debts to Wall Street amounted to more than 1,000 billion US dollars. This meant that US derivatives had been bought on a large scale with dollars borrowed from Wall Street, which were now being demanded back by the latter. Panic broke out among the banks, whereupon governments had to pump trillions into the financial system and nationalize banks, insurance companies and other enterprises, so that one could certainly speak of a communism of capital. This placed a heavy burden on the budget coffers of the USA and the states in Europe and an intensified austerity policy was the logical consequence, with governments attempting to transfer the losses of capital and the financial system to wage-earning workers and employees, parts of the indebted middle class and the precariat, the unemployed and those who were completely left behind. In Europe, countries were set against each other, i.e. the crisis problem caused by financial capital was reinterpreted as a conflict between work-shy southern countries and hard-working northern Europeans, or alternatively it was the allegedly bloated welfare state in Germany, Italy or Greece, excessively high wages, overly rigid labor markets or even the trade unions that were responsible for the crisis. In addition, state bailouts are unpopular with large sections of the population, financial crises are often associated with moral failure not only on the part of bankers, but also politicians, and the relationship between creditor and debtor can easily be personified. All this strengthens right-wing movements. It is easy to see that in the USA and Europe, ideological set pieces made up of nationalism, racism and neoliberal garbage have gained weight and momentum following the financial crisis. And the right-wing populist movements only had to cling to this type of “discourse” in order to inspire sections of the population with their paranoia and extermination fantasies, especially on social networks, and then finally take action themselves and attack the refugee camps with incendiary devices and steel balls. The national preferences that are being staged today, such as Brexit, cannot become part of the smooth functioning of the state’s social welfare system without constantly constructing, spreading and mobilizing fear of migrants, refugees and Muslims and thus placing it in the service of controlling the mobility of those parts of the population that have to migrate from the south of the globe to the north in order to survive at all. The contrast between the complete freedom of the flow of goods, money and capital on the one hand and the lack of mobility of large parts of the world’s population on the other must be pacified by specific forms of regulation, which are materialized by the state apparatuses and ideologically fuelled by populist neo-fascist movements. The free flow of goods, services and capital across borders takes precedence over the mobility of people, whereby highly qualified foreign workers from the South should also be integrated into the economies of the metropolises, but only the owners and managers of big capital as well as the political and cultural elites are guaranteed relatively free movement around the globe. Today, a large part of humanity is simply stuck in more or less camp-like conditions and dwellings.
[1] The state can universalize the categories of perception within the borders of its territory by constituting a population whose members possess the same categories of perception after having undergone and suffered specific conditioning and inculcation procedures called education. This applies in particular to the construction of the citizen: in the liberal conception of the state, the citizen is anyone who is recognized as such by a constitution; he or she does not have to have any special characteristics associated with blood or origin, as later assumed by ethnic racism. The state establishes the citizen as a formally free and equal subject that is identical with its atomization, and at the same time represents the unity that is divided into formally equal monads. This indicates its political sovereignty.
Fascism, on the other hand, places the nation before the citizen in order to ultimately liquidate the latter. The national character, which is by no means to be equated with citizenship, but which the Germans always mix with it in order to ultimately favor even the nation over the general citizen, is the result of certain disciplining and inculcation procedures, all of which amount to a sublimated racism. In contrast to the national character, the citizen is a purely juridical entity that exists insofar as the citizen is placed in a relationship of rights and duties to the state, whereas the nation in German conservative state theory is considered an ethnocultural entity that can be legally defined and territorialized by the state, but is still clearly distinct from citizenship. Ultimately, however, it is the capitalist state that produces the nation with its constitutive elements (uniform economic market, territory and language) by deliberately intervening in the material space and time matrices that are to become part of the capitalist economy and the relations of production.
[2] The proletariat is always already a migrant proletariat, because at any point in time the worker in a wage labor relationship can be dismissed in order to have to settle somewhere else according to the demands of capital accumulation. This mobility of the proletariat, even if it remains spatially limited, is a condition of modern industry. And without the migration of the global proletariat to new markets, from country to city, from city to city, from country to country, capitalist accumulation would not be possible. As the most deterritorialized part of the proletariat today, the global surplus population, although spatially hard-packed, see camp formation, has the greatest potential for revolutionary transformation. This is because, in the sense of Deleuze/Guattari, it functions as a minority that is nothing more than a proletarianized mass, but as a mass is immediately confronted with the institutional, police and legal structures of the nation states.
The Schmittian construction of migration policies must be stopped at all costs: For him, nomadism is always only a temporary phenomenon of migration, so that it must inevitably become the source of a new territorial order that takes place between imperialisms or states; it finds its historical destiny in becoming part of these formations, and if certain conditions are refused by it, then acts of violence quickly occur that destroy it.
[3] The state interventions to save the financial system extended to lending to private banks and to their recapitalization, to the purchase of bank assets and state guarantees for bank deposits or even for bank balance sheets. In total, the institutions involved (central banks, banking supervisory authorities and finance ministries) made over 7 trillion dollars available for this purpose. The intensity of the measures for the respective economies depended on the degree of interconnectedness of a country with global financial capital, the amount of available public funds, executive policies and the power of domestic corporations and banks. In the US, taxpayers were less burdened by the US Treasury’s bailout measures than in Europe.
[4] These tightening measures are based on the pretence of exclusion, as HartzIV recipients have no business in the market where there is a reasonably secure core workforce in the large companies, the partially self-employed precariat and the state-subsidized dependent employees. The superfluous remainder are relegated to forced labor as HartzIV recipients, in which work itself is the marginal income, since a basic income independent of work continues to be rejected.
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